Africa Zero

As
the sun sunk behind the horizon I gathered lumps of bark from a huge
preconvulsion baobab dying a hundred-year-death on the cliff top. By the time I
had a fire going the moon was filling the night with mercury light, reflected
from its labyrinth etched face, and hyraxes were screeching like murder victims
from the heather trees behind me. It was for comfort really, the fire; for that
old comfort born in the hidden psyche when men crouched in caves and feared the
night, the last time the ice was here. I had no need of the heat or of cooked
food. Few earthly extremes of temperature were dangerous to me and the
sustenance I took was poison to flesh.

While
staring into the flames I slowly altered the spectrum of my hearing. The
screeching of the hyraxes became a low gasping and other sounds began to
impinge; the mutter of cooling rock and the strained whispering of the heather
trees. Then, a sound I had not heard in twenty years: the low infrasonic
rumbles that were the conversation of mammoth. I listened for a while and
realised I was smiling, then I stood from my fire, walked to the baobab at the
edge of the Break and looked out over the silvered foothills.

Behind
me the Atlas Mountains of Old Morocco still held back the ice that had swamped
Europe. Six centuries in the past the hills below me had been bare, and arid
where they faded into the Sahara desert. Five centuries ago the wasteland had
begun to bloom as water vapour, blown down off the ice, condensed and fell in
storms still told of around the campfires of bushmen. Now the hills were thick
with vegetation, and wild with the fauna that fed on it including, of course,
the mammoth. But it was not the ice that had caused their return.

Far
below me a lone bull was tusking bark from a huge groundsel tree and muttering
to himself like a grouchy old man. I watched him for a while and felt an
affinity with those men in ancient Siberia to whom this creature had been all
life and a lord of death, and who had hunted it to extinction. Men not so
different from he who had resurrected it. I remembered the first herd: cloned
from ten thousand years old carcases preserved in the Siberian tundra, gestated
in the wombs of elephants, and kept as a tourist attraction in a national park
in North Africa. Perhaps they would have remained no more than that—a novelty.
But then had come the thinning of the human race.

To
begin with, the compulsory sterilization of one in three people was introduced
planet-wide. Then air-transmitted HIV’s and more virulent diseases had
appeared. It was open to conjecture whether they had evolved or been
manufactured. The nightmarish creatures that appeared and fed on the
out-of-control third-world population had certainly been gene-spliced. The
dictums at that time had been: better not to be born than to be born and starve
to death. Your neighbour dies so you might live. The human race cannot be
strong while the weak breed: the human race must be prey. Some called it a
catastrophe and against the teaching of God. Others called it the choice of
survival.

During
the chaos of that time, as ten billion people fought for insufficient resources
and the encroaching ice sucked the planet dry, during the water wars, plagues,
brief atomic conflicts, and desperate strivings to become established beyond
Earth, the mammoth had broken free and roamed across North Africa. While
millions then billions of humans died the mammoth burgeoned. I always
considered this a beautiful irony and a kind of justice: humans had been too
busy killing each other to notice. But then it is easy for me to make such
judgements. I ceased to be human in many ways over two thousand years ago.

In
time the bull finished with the tree and dozed in the moonlight with his four
metre tusks resting on the ground. I turned away to head back for my fire, but
then, suddenly, his trumpeting shattered the night. As the hyraxes fell silent
I turned back to the Break. Something... something of flickering silver and
shadow darted round him then was gone before I could upgrade my vision. Pykani?
I doubted it. They would be in the air; dark bat shapes singing their calming
songs as they moved in for blood. They would not have startled him. I waited
and watched his heat and the red colours, but the shape did not reappear. At length
I returned to my fire, troubled, but not unduly so.

* * *

The
bright flames flickered and died like night spectres and the bark collapsed to
black-edged rubies. I considered the possibility of sleep and rejected it. I
had slept for three hours a couple of days ago up on the ice and I would not
need to sleep again for several weeks. Boredom drove me into fugue and I
listened like a yogi to the oh-so-accurate ticking of my body clock as the
altered moon traversed its arc and the hyraxes raised Cain. An hour before
sunrise the sky began to lighten. Only then did I come out of fugue and kick
dirt over the cooling ashes of my fire. Time to move on.

* * *

The
Break was a new addition to the Atlas Mountains. When the ice had first reached
the coast of Old Morocco it was as if it had suddenly rested its entire weight
there and tipped a plate on which the mountains rested. The event was The
Convulsion and The Break was the further edge of that plate. It was heaved from
the Atlas foothills in less than a year, seven centuries ago.

Under
the baobab I removed my boots and put them in my pack. Then I removed the
synthiflesh coverings of my fingers and toes and placed them in my pack as
well. The sky was lighter then, pink tinted to the east, and that light glinted
like blood off the knurling on the inner faces of my metal fingers: a reminder
of what I am and what I am not. Shouldering my pack I moved to the edge,
lowered myself over, and began to descend, driving my fingers and toes like
pitons into the mossy crevices in the rock. At first I was careful. Even for me
a fall from such a height could kill. As the sun breached the horizon I was two
hundred feet down with another hundred to go. One bad moment then when a huge
black scorpion did its damnedest to sting my face and I jerked away, pulling a
slab from the cliff face and abruptly found myself hanging by one hand,
watching the slab crash into the jungle below. Synthetic or not my reactions
are still flesh, much to my chagrin. Fifty feet from the ground and I was scrabbling
down the cliff face like a spider. I dropped the last twenty feet straight into
the rosette of a giant lobelia, scattering sunbirds like a treasure of
sapphires and emeralds. Once free of the flattened plant it took me some time
to clean the sap from myself before I could replace my coverings and return to
a semblance of humanity. Then, booted and fingered again, I made my way into
the greenery.

Beyond
the patch of lobelias, I pushed my way through a five-foot thicket of
putrescent-smelling plants I could not put a name to, but these thinned out to
give way to wild banana plants, groundsels hung with sulphurous yellow lichen,
and a ground covering of bracken. Soon I reached the remains of the groundsel,
of which the mammoth had made a meal, and there, where the jungle had been
flattened, found progress easier. All around this area frogs were chirruping
noisily, perhaps because they could now see the venomous spiders that hunted
them. As I advanced, a python the thickness of my torso observed me speculatively
from a tree, tested my scent with his tongue, then lost interest. At one point
I heard something stalking me, but it soon went away. I was exposed on that
narrow path, but I knew that if I stayed with the mammoth I would eventually
encounter those I had come to see.

* * *

I
smelt it an hour before I found it. The smells were not of carrion. The corpse
was too fresh to have decayed. They were the smells of the blood and broken
intestines of a huge ruminant. It was the bull I had seen the night before.

Three
lions were feeding in a desultory manner while other scavengers were squabbling
for their share. A mortuary of vultures held raucous autopsy: over their black
feather suits their gory heads were hooked like question marks as they shrugged
‘don’t knows’ at each other, then ‘what the hells?’ as they tipped them back to
swallow choice bloody morsels. A pack of hyenas yipped and snarled round a leg
that had been torn away. It must have taken the whole pack of them to drag the
joint to where it lay, and from where they kept a wary eye on the lions, but
there was plenty for all it would seem, else the lions would have been driven
away. Other birds, small foxes, wild dogs, and feral cats had homed in on the
bounty. Even a group of black-skinned frogs had crawled from the undergrowth to
lap at a pool of blood.

Leaning
against the trunk of a vine-choked baobab I switched off my sense of smell, but
even then I could taste the blood in the air. It was a grisly scene. I looked
at the lions and did not believe their claim. Three lions did not bring down
and dismember something weighing nigh on thirty tons. Three lions did not
shatter four-metre long tusks and break open a skull ten centimetres thick. I
looked at the carnage with a clinical eye. I knew of only a few things that
could do this: a roving tyrannosaur, but they were rare on the ground now as
they tended to chase after people and end up on the wrong end of a missile
launcher, and anyway, it would still have been feeding; the Chuthrat Dragon,
which I knew to be on another continent; or man. This looked like the work of
man. It looked as if a human being had taken out this mammoth with something
like a laser. I advanced to hold my own autopsy.

Snarling,
the hyenas moved out of my way then closed back in on their meat once I was
past. One of the lions was not so obliging. It climbed to its feet, its stomach
bulging ridiculously, and growled a warning at me. I continued my advance
knowing that if I attempted to circle, it would probably move in front of me out
of pure contrariness. As I drew closer, it stooped down and shuffled its back
legs in preparedness to pounce. I timed my move carefully, knowing full stomach
or not a lion can move with devastating alacrity. Snarling, it sprang straight
at me—claws and teeth and a trail of bloody saliva. I stepped aside and caught
it a blow on the shoulder, not too hard, just enough to send it cartwheeling
through the air with a startled howl. It hit the ground and was up in an
instant, its tail thrashing from side to side, then with clumsy dignity it
retreated and watched me. Its two fellows, I noted, had been closing in from
the sides and now pulled back, one to flop down panting, the other to clean
itself conspicuously.

Once
by the head of the mammoth I ignored the lions as I unshouldered my backpack
and took off my shirt. The skull, I noted, was split cleanly, and the tusks had
been sheared as if with a saw. Their faces looked almost polished. I pulled the
two gory halves of the skull apart and probed around inside for shrapnel or the
remains of some other projectile. I found none. I then inspected the outside of
the head for sign of burning or at least singeing. No sign. I stepped further
back, blood up my arms and across my chest, and tried to determine by the angle
of fall, the surroundings, something, anything.

“Hold
it right there, you bastard!”

I
turned slowly. A woman stood about twenty feet from me. She was white, which
was a surprise, had cropped blond hair, and was dressed in one of those grey,
practically indestructible, monofilament coveralls. From this I deduced she
must be a member of one of the corporate families that had come down to Africa
during the Great Migration. For a moment I also thought she might be like me.
Her right hand was of metal, tungsten ceramal like my own, but without a
synthiflesh covering. But taking into account she held her rifle left-handed I
guessed that the hand might be all that was synthetic about her.

“I’ve
been waiting for this for a long time,” she said viciously.

“And
what might that be?” I asked, relieved as I studied her weapon. It was not the
disintegrator I had first assumed it to be. A pulse of antiphotons will do to
me what it does to all matter. What she held was a projectile weapon, though
admittedly a high tech one.

“You,”
she replied.

I
considered that for a moment: either she knew who I was and had a grudge, in
which case she had been very stupid to come after me with such inferior
armament, or her assumptions were mistaken.

“I
did not kill this mammoth,” I said.

“Hah!”
It was not even a laugh. “I saw you bat that lion aside. What have you got?
Cybernetic implants? Is that what you used on the mammoth? Or is that too close
in for you? What did you use, a ten mil flack rifle?”

I
did not particularly admire her logic. “I restate. I did not kill this
mammoth.” I turned to fetch my shirt and pack.

“Hold
it!”